3 ms·

The distinction you are making is a bit artificial.

• ars 11y ago
  Not really. At a certain age people die of "nothing", they just die, without any specific reason. It's not the same as curing something that kills people early.
  • kbenson 11y ago
    I was under the impression that wasn't the case, there's always something, or more accurately, many somethings working together that cause degradation of the system to the point of failure. Are you saying at some point some major organ like the heart just decides to stop beating?
    • JoshTriplett 11y ago
      It's not that there isn't a cause. But at some point, humans start dying of multiple systemic failures, and whatever proximate cause happens to lead to death, the root cause is aging.
      • kbenson 11y ago
        So, similarly to AIDS, the proximate cause is a specific problem, the root cause is AIDS and a reduced immunodeficiency system. The question is, do we treat aging as this unavoidable and untreatable condition that will kill us, or do we treat it as a condition to be managed or cured like anything else?
        • JoshTriplett 11y ago
          > The question is, do we treat aging as this unavoidable and untreatable condition that will kill us, or do we treat it as a condition to be managed or cured like anything else? Exactly. We need to do the latter, rather than just treating the symptoms. Aging is not untreatable, it's just hard. But it's by far the most worthwhile, because fixing it would fix so many other problems at once.
  • smeyer 11y ago
    People don't die of "nothing". When it's said that someone dies of old age, there's still some actual medical cause (although no one is demanding an autopsy to find it when an 85 year old dies peacefully in their sleep).
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • morcheeba 11y ago
    People don't just die of "nothing" ... it's just that the death is natural and we don't bother investigating. But, usually, it's one of these that kills old people: http://seniorhealth.about.com/od/deathanddying/tp/cause_death.htm http://seniorhealth.about.com/od/deathanddying/tp/cause_deat...
• rfrey 11y ago
  It's not artificial at all. Lifespan is a distribution, what OP describes is moving the distribution around a bit without moving the bounds.
  • kbenson 11y ago
    What if there are no upper bounds, and all there is to work with is the distribution?
    • ska 11y ago
      Do we have any evidence for that view? There is at least some evidence for the converse.
      • kbenson 11y ago
        What evidence is that? What single thing is absolutely sure to kill us by age X? Specifically, I don't think "aging", which is really a root cause of other things which cause us to die counts. If the problems aging causes could be reversed or cured, then aging no longer would cause death.
        • ska 11y ago
          Telomere shortening would be one example which, if there is no mitigation possible (and we don't have one or know that one is possible) is a pretty hard limit. That's why I said "some evidence" not "strong evidence", we haven't proven that there is an unavoidable hard limit, but a) we have no evidence that there isn't and b) we know of several mechanisms that look like they may be hard limits.
          • kbenson 11y ago
            I'm aware of telomere shortening, but my understanding is that the theory is not as widely accepted as you imply. I could be wrong though, so feel free to support that,I'm open to new information. That said, it's a limit we may need to overcome at some point if we wish to prolong our lives past a certain point. It's a good candidate for an upper bound on life expectancy, but we still aren't even sure it works as we think. I think that's a good reason why we haven't directly worked on increasing the bounds of life expectancy, we are still definitively identifying them. Note: I may have come across a bit sharply in my prior comment, but my intent was literally to just ask for the evidence you were referring to and supply criteria I thought needed to apply.